I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Friday, April 27, 2012

Week in the Life: Bottleneck

That's five days ago. Today, the Tech buy price in Jita is over 200,000 per unit. And "OTEC", the Organization of Technetium Exporting Corporations has apparently gone from "troll" to "reality". OTEC apparently started as a troll by Mittens to see if he could drive the price of Technetium up in the market. But then he actually started chatting with the alliances that control this stuff, and after that... Goons gotta Goon. I've already written about that.

I recently saw an estimate that Technetium makes up something like 40% of the sale price of a Hulk.

And that struck me as a really low estimate. So it set me to wondering, on a value basis, how much Technetium actually goes into a Hulk? It quickly became one of those questions that, had I known the amount of work that it would take to answer the question, I never would have asked it. ;-) But below, you'll find the answer.

I apologize in advance: scary math ahead. Matter of fact, if you're not into the industry side of EVE, you might want to skip the entire table that's coming up and just rejoin me at the very bottom. I've only included the table so that the industrialists out there can check my figures. Ready? Here we go.

---snip---

Mineral and PI components

Covetor

Tritanium

2,128,194

2,128,194

Pyerite

647,511

647,511

Mexallon

61,516

61,516

Isogen

17,911

17,911

Nocxium

3987

3987

Zydrine

1034

1034

Megacyte

271

271

Construction Blocks

Toxic Metals

50 @ 40

2000

Reactive Metals

50 @ 40

2000

Morphite

72

72

R.A.M. - Starship Tech

Tritanium

10 @ 502

5020

Pyerite

10 @ 402

4020

Mexallon

10 @ 201

2010

Isogen

10 @ 74

740

Nocxium

10 @ 32

320

Subtotal Minerals and PI components

Tritanium

2,133,214

@ 6.05

= 12,905,945

Pyerite

651,531

@ 7.01

= 4,567,233

Mexallon

61,836

@ 51.45

= 3,181,463

Isogen

18,651

@ 93.46

= 1,743,123

Nocxium

4307

@ 945.21

= 4,071,019

Zydrine

1034

@ 1623.59

= 1,678,792

Megacyte

271

@ 3370

= 913,270

Morphite

72

@ 14,706

= 1,058,832

Reactive Metals

2000

@ 315.56

= 631,120

Toxic Metals

2000

@ 176.25

= 352,500

T2 Construction Components

Crystalline Carbonide Armor Plate

Crystalline Carbonide

2600 @ 40

= 104,000

Sylramic Fibers

2600 @ 10

= 26,000

Fusion Reactor Unit

Crystalline Carbonide

39 @ 8

= 312

Fermionic Condensates

39 @ 1

= 39

Ferrogel

39 @ 1

= 39

Ion Thruster

Crystalline Carbonide

52 @ 12

= 624

Ferrogel

52 @ 1

= 52

Phenolic Composites

52 @ 3

= 156

Magnetometric Sensor Cluster

Crystalline Carbonide

195 @ 12

= 2340

Hypersynaptic Fibers

195 @ 2

= 390

Nanotransitors

195 @ 1

= 195

Oscillator Capacitor Unit

Crystalline Carbonide

520 @ 24

= 12,480

Fullerides

520 @ 15

= 7800

Nanotransitors

520 @ 1

= 520

Photon Microprocessor

Crystalline Carbonide

2600 @ 12

= 31,200

Nanotransitors

2600 @ 5

= 13,000

Phenolic Composites

2600 @ 1

= 2600

Pulse Shield Emitter

Crystalline Carbonide

195 @ 20

= 3900

Ferrogel

195 @ 1

= 195

Sylramic Fibers

195 @ 8

= 1560

Subtotal T2 Construction Components

Crystalline Carbonide

154,856

Sylramic Fibers

27,560

Fermionic Condensates

39

Ferrogel

286

Phenolic Composites

2756

Hypersynaptic Fibers

390

Nanotransitors

13,715

Fullerides

7800

T2 Moon Mining Materials

Crystalline Carbonide

Carbon Polymers

154,856/10,000

= 15.49

@ 50 Hydrocarbons

= 775

= 15.49

@ 50 Silicates

= 775

Crystalline Alloy

154,856/10,000

= 15.49

@ 50 Cadmium

= 775

= 15.49

@ 50 Cobalt

= 775

Sylramic Fibers

Ceramic Powder

27,560/6000

= 4.59

@ 50 Evap Deposits

= 230

= 4.59

@ 50 Silicates

= 230

Hexite

27,560/6000

= 4.59

@ 50 Chromium

= 230

= 4.59

@ 50 Platinum

= 230

Fermionic Condensates

Caesarium Cadmide

39/200

= 0.20

@ 50 Cadmium

= 10

= 0.20

@ 50 Caesium

= 10

Dysporite

39/200

= 0.20

@ 50 Dysprosium

= 10

= 0.20

@ 50 Mercury

= 10

Fluxed Condensates

39/200

= 0.20

@ 50 Neodymium

= 10

= 0.20

@ 50 Thulium

= 10

Prometium

39/200

= 0.20

@ 50 Cadmium

= 10

= 0.20

@ 50 Promethium

= 10

Ferrogel

Ferrofluid

286/400

= 0.72

@ 50 Dysprosium

= 36

= 0.72

@ 50 Hafnium

= 36

Hexite

286/400

= 0.72

@ 50 Chromium

= 36

= 0.72

@ 50 Platinum

= 36

Hyperflurite

286/400

= 0.72

@ 50 Promethium

= 36

= 0.72

@ 50 Vanadium

= 36

Prometium

286/400

= 0.72

@ 50 Cadmium

= 36

= 0.72

@ 50 Promethium

= 36

Phenolic Composites

Caesarium Cadmide

2756/2200

= 1.26

@ 50 Cadmium

= 63

= 1.26

@ 50 Caesium

= 63

Silicon Diborite

2756/2200

= 1.26

@ 50 Evap Deposits

= 63

= 1.26

@ 50 Silicates

= 63

Vanadium Hafnite

2756/2200

= 1.26

@ 50 Hafnium

= 63

= 1.26

@ 50 Vanadium

= 63

Hypersynaptic Fibers

Dysporite

390/750

= 0.52

@ 50 Dysprosium

= 26

= 0.52

@ 50 Mercury

= 26

Solerium

390/750

= 0.52

@ 50 Evap Deposits

= 26

= 0.52

@ 50 Silicates

= 26

Vanadium Hafnite

390/750

= 0.52

@ 50 Caesium

= 26

= 0.52

@ 50 Chromium

= 26

Nanotransistors

Neo Mercurite

13,715/1500

= 9.15

@ 50 Mercury

= 458

= 9.15

@ 50 Neodymium

= 458

Platinum Technite

13,715/1500

= 9.15

@ 50 Platinum

= 458

= 9.15

@ 50 Technetium

= 458

Sulfuric Acid

13,715/1500

= 9.15

@ 50 Atmo Gases

= 458

= 9.15

@ 50 Evap Deposits

= 458

Fullerides

Carbon Polymers

7800/3000

= 2.60

@ 50 Hydrocarbons

= 130

= 2.60

@ 50 Silicates

= 130

Platinum Technite

7800/3000

= 2.60

@ 50 Platinum

= 130

= 2.60

@ 50 Technetium

= 130

Total T2 Moon Mining Materials

Atmospheric Gasses

458

@ 176.26

= 80,728

Cadmium

894

@ 2457.66

= 2,197,148

Caesium

99

@ 2107.81

= 208,673

Chromium

292

@ 2235.06

= 652,637

Cobalt

775

@ 666.27

= 516,359

Dysprosium

72

@ 8901.31

= 640,894

Evaporite Deposits

777

@ 834.79

= 648,632

Hafnium

99

@ 2453.71

= 242,918

Hydrocarbons

905

@ 202.52

= 183,281

Mercury

494

@ 3905.25

= 1,929,194

Neodymium

468

@ 15,128.39

= 7,080,086

Platinum

854

@ 3035.65

= 2,592,446

Promethium

82

@ 3620.12

= 296,850

Silicates

1224

@ 1080.81

= 1,322,912

Technetium

588

@ 201,007

= 118,192,116

Thulium

10

@ 3015.08

= 30,151

Vanadium

99

@ 2891.77

= 286,286

Total Materials and Value Proportions

Raw material

Value

Proportion

Technetium

118,192,116

70.3%

Tritanium

12,905,945

7.7%

Neodymium

7,080,086

4.2%

Pyerite

4,567,233

2.7%

Nocxium

4,071,019

2.4%

Mexallon

3,181,463

1.9%

Platinum

2,592,446

1.5%

Cadmium

2,197,148

1.3%

Mercury

1,929,194

1.1%

Isogen

1,743,123

1.0%

Zydrine

1,678,792

1.0%

EVERYTHING ELSE

8,023,043

4.8%

---snip---

On a raw material value basis, Technetium makes up 70% of a Hulk.

And I suspect if I ran the numbers for most other Tech 2 ships and modules, the answer would be the same. And it's only going to go up if "OTEC" decides to restrict the supply of Tech. By the way, don't get the impression that it costs 170 million to build a Hulk. It does not. I haven't included the invention process, which is expensive. One of these days, I need to write a blog post about that. But yeah, in terms of the actual materials that go into a Hulk, Tech is 70%.

Kinda puts an interesting spin on the biggest Tech-holder in the game trying to blow up a lot of Hulks, doesn't it?

So basically, they're not only trolling/griefing miners, but they're making craptons of money off of it by being the only way for them to get replacements.I think Mittens has proven by now that banning him is not only completely useless, but it also leads to profit. Lots and lots of profit.

Funny the first thing I noticed was how many crystalline carbonide armor plates go into that thing. I thing we need to start using something besides crystalline carbonide to make those armor plates, as they don't seem to be very protective :).

I think it's still just a troll, just a successful one. People panicked and bought up Tc.

I'm 100% sure that "OTEC" can't regulate Tc production. Even if they agree to do so, they would all lie and smuggle TC. The real OPEC can control oil as counting oil tankers on the sea is easier than counting jump freighters. Especially if they are on neutral alts. Without restricting production the price cannot elevate.

The alternative is that Tc rise is from increased demand and The Mittani just try to act like he is causing it to inflate his fame. Please note it's elevating constantly, long before he announced anything.

Opec does control oil prices to a large extent. If they flooded the market with increased production, the market price would eventually drop when there are 100's of millions of barrel of oil sitting there on the market and can not be used due to no more refinary capacity. The price for oil would drop at that point. But until that happens, prices won't drop, and we have not hit the point where production exceeds refinary capacity...

Amusing, but we already knew that Tech moons were the biggest cash cow in Eve - orders of magnitude easier and more profitable to milk for ISK than Incursions and L4 missions *combined*. How else can you afford to build, and lose, fleets of Titans?

Fortunately, as one of my fellow Anon posters noted, T1 ships and modules need no Tech moon products. If this means that everyone just starts using more T1 ships and mods, rather than rushing to get into T2 ships and mods, this works for me.

The Mittani is actually doing CCP a great favor. T2 has gotten too cheap - when every 3-month old noob in the game can afford to fit and fly with T2, what's the point of T1 anyways?

And, after Sreegs and Co. discover that a number of the Goons have been supplying ISK to RMT sellers, they will hold the record for the most negative wallets in Eve history. That should also take care of the "too much ISK in Eve" problem, as well.

well, yes, but you forget about insurance covering T1 but not T2. that's a meaningful isk sink. And, excuse me, but i rather like the idea of 3 month old n00bs being able to fly ships they can train too without staring poverty in the face. You pvpers always talk about "never fly a ship you can't afford to lose"

If you look up the definition of "tier" is basically means a layer or level or rank. Tier 1 battlecruisers are entry level or lowest rank and only require BC trained to level 1 to fly them. Like wise a tier 2 BC is a step up from tier 1 costs a little more and should in theory be a better ship and requires BC trained to level 2. Tier 3 BCs are the same only a little beter. We currently also have 3 tiers of Battleships and 3 tiers of tech 1 frigs.

Technology level 2 or Tech 2 is, as the name would imply, a totally different technology. It uses different materials and different methodology to build and is significantly more powerful with multiple bonuses. It requires the tech 1 racial skill trained to 5 as well as the tech 2 ship skill. Examples are assault frigs or marauders or what ever.

Since tech 2 is abbreviated T2 and tier 3 has been abbreviated T3 as well as tech 3 strategic cruisers being labeled T3 also it seems some people get confused. Tier 3 battlecruisers are tech level 1. They are made with normal minerals found in asteroids and require no moon minerals. They are also priced accordingly. Tech 3 cruisers are significantly more expensive and significantly more powerful than tier 3 tech 1 BCs.

Jester if you have not done a blog on this topic could you please do so, so that people can just hyper link the explanation instead of having to spell this out in comments every time?

It's worth pointing out that CCP are doing away with 'tiers' of ships come Inferno - all ships in the same class (brutix and myrmidon, for example) will have roughly equal strengths in the role they are designed to fill.

It's never too late to learn new things of course, just not worth re-planning your training queue over.

Why not see it from another perspective! Mitanni, with OTEC will do what he couldnt do when he was a chairman of CSM!

He will make the price rise so high and make so many people cry about the cartel that CCP will not be able to ignore it anymore and will be forced to change moongoo, not in the next 6 months but maybe in a month or 2!

In the end, we will be in debt to Mitanni and thanking him again for abusing so much of something that it will finally be fixed. And no, I'm not a goons lover!

A couple of things.First, inventing hulk bpc's isn't that expensive. All in cost including decryptors, datacores and covetor bpc's bought on the market is about 25mm per copy (the calculation is the cost of the inputs divided by the percentage chance to succeed in the invention, and adjusted for the number of copies you get given the decryptor). With materials costs of 170mm and the bpc at 25mm, there is plenty of manufacturing profit in building hulks.

Second, CCP can always play with alchemy to ease up the tech shortage, just as it did with dysprosium back in the day

By the way, don't get the impression that it costs 170 million to build a Hulk. It does not. I haven't included the invention process, which is expensive. One of these days, I need to write a blog post about that.

bitch please, everyone knows that if you do it yourself, its free. So if you want a hulk mine the ores, buy a bpo, invent the bpc and you have a free hulk sans the tech, which yu will have to buy, unless youre a techmoon holder, then its a completely free hulk.

Covetor BPO is not free and if you are looking just to make one for yourself you are much better off buying BPCs. Anything that you mine yourself has value. Now you can buy the minerals or mine the ore and refine the minerals but either way those minerals have value. You could sell them or run missions and buy them. If you wanted to be smart about it you could figure out which way you could make isk fastest and do more of that to buy the stuff you need or want. It's not very efficient to do everything yourself.

Now it may be fun to build yourself a hulk on your own from start to finish but the time you spent doing so does not make it free. After all with all the pretend things in the virtual universe of Eve your time is the only real and quantifiable thing.

There is one point everyone seems to be missing. Covetors mine about 20% less than Hulks. With all of the mineral changes from drone compounds and meta 0 loot disappearing if you add a 20% base reduction in mining ships yield then the price of everything goes up.

So increasing the cost of T2 to the point of unaffordability affects everything indirectly and not just T2 items.

At the dev meetup last nights, Soundwave mentioned that they were planning on adding an alchemy recipe for tech later in the year, so this won't last for more about six months. still could be a painful six months...

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Technetium says that it's the suppliers that have driven the price up and has nothing to do with it's intrinsic value.

http://community.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1214702 That thread's OP had some very good points on the bottleneck and what to do about it (including suggesting alchemy)

hmmmm...so doing a bit of homework i realize alchemy was for substituting the "R64" rarity moon goo, and technetium is "R32" of which includes mercury, hafnium and caesium. Put another way, the group that platinum technite belongs to includes Vanadium Hafnite, Solerium, and Caesarium Cadmide whose market history are more tepid than Platinum Technite.Obviously, looking at Jester's data none of these materials are worth anywhere near platinum technite...I just don't understand why only technetium moons are so valuable? I mean, what about mercury, hafnium and caesium moon distribution and rarity compared to technetium - aren't they just as 'rare' in new eden? Is this all about cartels being better at moon monopoly in Gurista space?

why's it so disproportional? I have a really hard time beleiving it's merely supplier cartels alone because where's the caesium, hafnium and mercury cartels? mercury is also an ingredient in nanotransistors.

Maybe ring mining will remove the bottlenecks and balance the situation, but maybe we do need alchemy for another class of reaction?Hafnium and Mercury are used in 3 alchemy reactions...can we add Caesium (r32) and Chromium (r16) to a new "unrefined platinum technite" alchemy result? As you can see from the above table both moon goos aren't exactly in their prime.

The wiki is wrong. Tech prices have everything to do with demand for them, and (almost) nothing to do with supply.

The basic problem with tech is that too many T2 components use it. What this means is that other types of moon goo have almost no uses outside of those which involve technetium. This creates a "bottleneck" where if you have the tech to build whatever you need, getting everything else is easy, as there are a surplus of suppliers. Moongoo is produced at close to zero cost, and demand is constrained by the bottleneck, so prices of non-tech moongoo plumet, while tech basically gains all of the value of T2 components/ships.

It isn't just supply. When CCP "rebalanced" moon minerals and T2 recipes a few years ago they messed up. They made Tech the bottleneck in T2 production. Industry types (including goons) warned them that they were making a mistake, and were about to make a regional R32 more valuable than any of the R64s, but CCP did it anyway. With the new recipies, more tech was needed than actually exists in the universe, and unlike R64s, R32s couldn't be made through alchemy.

i wonder if mittens is only doing that for griefing and money...cause 1) sure he likes griefing 2) i'm pretty sure goons don't care about money at the point they are...

however...all these alliances ceo who accepted the deal agreed on something else before : that technium was bad.and last time ccp talked about they said they were okay with the current situation, but would rethink about it if price change.you know what ? price has changed.in fact, if the dark character who is mittens want tears, i'm pretty sure the guy behing the keyboard is trying to pressure again ccp to make them nerf technium and/or put comet mining on the top of the to do list...

Well, it seems, if u want CCP to see things your way, u have to have an impact on the game (Jita riots anyone?).

Maybe mittens didn't remove that CSM hat entirely. He found a way to influence CCP's decision making throu in game means. His passion for the game combined with his darkish soul and the goons behind him might be the thing EVE needs to focus CCP on the issues that needs attention.And since real life market and economy "simulation" is one of the founding pillars that EVE rests on, market manipulation can be an effective way to get things done by CCP.

Or he just knows what is coming, and want's to get the most money out of his tech moons till he can!:)

Mittani is a piece of shit. In real life he was disbarred by the state of Maryland for ethics reasons. The Goons are nothing but fat neckbearded social drop outs. Look up their You Tube videos of their "Goonfest" gatherings and count the fat rolls.

The minute CCP sells Eve to EA Mittens and Goons are gone, a real company will not tolerate this sort of behaviour.

Hey, Jester! I'm actually a goon myself and this was an interesting read; particularly your numerical analysis snip. We have a long history of being trolls since long before we started being terrible at Eve Online, so I imagine it's difficult to take anything I say with any remote seriousness. In the off chance you actually put worth to these words, hopefully it will serve to get you to keep writing.

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